If you're one of those people who enjoys relaxing in a public park, maybe eating a sandwich and enjoying the lush greenspace Cincinnati has grown proud of, that's all well and good. (Bring a blanket and some apples; enjoy yourself.) That is, until you get a little sleepy and want to lie down on the ground or a bench — that's illegal now.

The Cincinnati Park Board yesterday approved a no-lying down rule across all of its 5,000 acres of park land, likely in response to ongoing Occupy Cincinnati lawsuits over the legality of closing the park at night. People who lie down in parks are now subject to $150 fines for the misdemeanor offense.

LaBotz, who opposes both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, says President Obama is using a shell game to funnel additional troops into Afghanistan while relying more heavily on private security forces — or “mercenaries,” as LaBotz calls them — to continue fighting in Iraq.

If you come from a large family, you might remember when older siblings would always get new clothes when you were a child and you'd get their hand-me downs. That's also been the situation at Paul Brown Stadium in the past, but Hamilton County commissioners are putting a stop to it. Because the county's Riverfront Parking Operations needs two new trucks, the plan had been to move two trucks from Paul Brown to parking services and buy new ones for the stadium. Commissioners balked at the plan Tuesday, saying the new trucks should be bought for Parking Operations. Commissioner Todd Portune estimates the county will save up to $20,000 because Parking Operations doesn't require the same kind of heavy-duty trucks the stadium uses.

Cincinnati City Council is considering restoring $250,000 to the Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV). Council had cut the money from CIRV's budget in late 2010, but statistics show that the number of shootings increased in the city afterward. When CIRV was in full effect, the percentage of shootings linked to gang activity fell from nearly 70 percent in 2007 to around 50 percent in 2008 and 2009, but has bounced up to 60 percent in 2011 and so far this year. Part of the cash allocated to CIRV would pay for a statistical analysis by researchers at the University of Cincinnati, to determine if there is a verifiable link.

Federal prosecutors want the jury in the upcoming insider trading trial of former Procter & Gamble Co. board member Rajat Gupta to hear secretly recorded telephone conversations with another man as evidence of the alleged conspiracy between them. The government said in a pre-trial filing that the conversations showed Gupta, also a former Goldman Sachs director, leaked Goldman board secrets at the height of the financial crisis in 2008. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recorded the calls.

The Reds postponed Tuesday's game against the Chicago Cubs due to high water on the field at Great American Ball Park. Heavy rains on Tuesday afternoon and evening saturated the area, and the stadium was no exception. A makeup date hasn't been announced. The action marks only the sixth time that the Reds have postponed a game since Great American opened in 2003.

Cincinnati Public Schools will make energy-saving renovations at 28 schools using a nearly $27 million low-interest loan. The school board approved the plan Monday, despite some board members' concerns about moving ahead with the projects while the district cuts jobs and faces an estimated $43 million deficit.

In news elsewhere, the rumors were true: Blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng was hiding at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing since escaping house arrest last month. Chen's presence was revealed today when he left the diplomatic compound to seek medical treatment after receiving assurances from China’s government that he would be treated humanely. Chinese leaders agreed that Chen would be reunited with his family, moved to a safe place and allowed to enroll in a university, U.S. officials said. (Well, that's one international crisis averted, and only about 50 more to go.)

One of Willard Mitt Romney's top campaign spokesmen is leaving his job less than two weeks after his appointment. Richard Grenell, Romney's national security spokesman, resigned after some hardcore conservatives complained about the hiring of the openly gay man. Others, however, say it also was because Grenell was coming under fire “for numerous sexist and impolitic statements he had made about prominent women and members of the media.” After the complaints, he scrubbed over 800 tweets from his Twitter feed and deleted his personal website. Some reporters who dealt with Grenell while he was a spokesman for the United Nations years ago called him the "most dishonest and deceptive press person" they had ever encountered.

President Obama made a surprise visit Tuesday to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, just before today's first anniversary of the killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Willard Mitt Romney has been criticizing the president's recent comments about bin Laden's death, but the Obama campaign questions whether Romney would've made the same decision, given his past statements. While in Afghanistan, Obama signed a security pact that means the United States will maintain a military presence there through 2024 – despite supposedly ending combat operations at the end of 2014. (For those keeping track, the deal means the United States will stay in Afghanistan for 23 years; let's just end the suspense and declare it our 51st state.)

City Council is expected to vote this morning to divert
the $4 million for the City Hall atrium project to jumpstart the Music
Hall renovation, which has brought the city and arts supporters
interested in owning and operating the historic venue closer to a
compromise. Council could vote on the renegotiated deal later Wednesday,
though details of the lease agreement have yet to be released.

Council is also expected to approve a property tax
increase of $10 per $100,000 in valuation to fund capital projects such
as a new West Side police station and additional road paving.

Today’s Hamilton County Transportation Improvement
District meeting will include a presentation about the Brent Spence
Bridge that will probably include polls.

Gov. John Kasich today will sign a human trafficking bill
that makes the crime a first-degree felony rather than second-degree and
includes funding to help victims.

The ACLU will represent the Ku Klux Klan in a legal fight involving Georgia’s highway cleanup program and a pending First Amendment lawsuit.

A Walgreens store and other pharmacies in Washington, D.C. are offering free HIV
tests to make diagnosing the disease more convenient and to increase
awareness.

College football has approved a four-team playoff to
determine its national championship rather than the computer-human
two-team plan that has faced scrutiny over the years. The new format
will start in the 2014-15 season.

City Leaders have decided that they
don't need to sell Music Hall to a private organization in order for
the historic building to receive tax credits toward its renovation.
Mayor Mallory on Sunday told The Enquirer that selling the building
was not part of any discussion he's willing to have. While city
leaders hope a public-private partnership like that which has
renovated Washington Park can help update the building, organizers
with the Music Hall Revitalization Co. say some donors willing to
contribute to the private renovation of the building will not
contribute to the project while it is city owned. On Saturday, the Music Hall Revitalization Co.'s leader, Jack Rouse, resigned.

First they had a giant bridge built
over their neighborhood. Now the residents of Lower Price Hill who
live near the Sixth Street viaduct hope construction crews can take
it down without causing too many clouds of lead paint dust to cover
their homes. The viaduct is being replaced by a new structure
currently under construction south of the existing one.

Ohio's second of four new casinos is
set to open in Toledo next week. Cleveland's casino opened last week,
while Columbus' Hollywood Casino is scheduled to open this fall with
Cincinnati's Horseshoe in-line for an early 2013 unveiling.

Jury selection in the trail of former
Goldman Sachs/Procter & Gamble board member Rajat Gupta began
today in federal court in Manhattan. Gupta is accused of insider
trading stemming from a 2008 phone call that authorities have already
used to convict hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, who is currently
serving an 11-year sentence. From the AP:

Rajaratnam has been the biggest catch so far in a wide-ranging
insider-trading investigation by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara that's
resulted in more than two dozen prosecutions of white collar
defendants. But based on Gupta's standing in the world of finance,
his trial could draw more attention — and a potential conviction
could resonate farther.

Aside from his role at Goldman Sachs, the Indian-born Gupta is
the former chief of McKinsey & Co., a highly regarded global
consulting firm that zealously guards its reputation for discretion
and integrity.

Gupta, 63, is also a former director of the huge consumer
products company Procter & Gamble Co., a pillar of American
industry and one of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones
industrial average. P&G owns many well-known brands including
Bounty, Tide and Pringles.

Researchers have created a national
registry of wrongful conviction exonerations that has identified 873 faulty convictions
during the past 23 years that have been recognized by authorities.
The registry's founders say the collection is only a fraction of such
convictions and that it demonstrates a serious problem with
America's criminal justice system.

"What this shows is that the
criminal justice system makes mistakes, and they are more common than
people think," said University of Michigan law professor Samuel
Gross, the registry's editor. "It is not the rule, but we won't
learn to get better unless we pay attention to these cases."

The John Edwards jury is still in
deliberations today trying to determine whether the former Democratic
presidential candidate conspired to violate election laws while
hiding an extramarital affair during his campaign. Prosecutors say
Edwards solicited more than $900,000 from a 101-year-old woman named
Rachel “Bunny” Mellon and a Texas lawyer to hide a child from his
wife, who had cancer at the time.

Leave it to The Enquirer to publish a story analyzing local school district spending vs. academic success only to ignore the existence of private schools while drawing the conclusion that “a district that spends more doesn't necessarily produce higher test scores and graduation rates.” The story, titled “Big-spending districts net mixed academic grades,” doesn't include the qualifier “public school” or the possibility that local private schools spend even more per pupil than Indian Hill, Sycamore Township, Mariemont and Norwood, each of which spent $11,958 to $15,209 per student last year and earned Excellent or better ratings.

Cemeteries have officially arrived in the 21st Century. A Crawfordsville, Ind., firm is now using Quick Response barcodes on tombstones. The Allen Monument Co. says the code can connect users to an entire memorial site about a deceased person, provided by Cincinnati-based Making Everlasting Memories. The site can include photos, a biography and other information. All it takes is a simple scan from a smartphone. That's either a brilliant step forward for convenience or a sign of consumerism and technology run amok. You decide.

It looks like charter schools aren't quite the draw that many conservatives believed they would be. Cincinnati Public Schools will lose fewer students than expected next year to private schools and state-funded vouchers, a school official said Tuesday. Only 899 new students applied for new Educational Choice scholarships for the upcoming school year. That’s down from 1,078 applicants from CPS last year and it’s far below the 1,377 students that district officials had estimated to lose this spring.

A Northern Kentucky police chief charged with drunken driving wants to suppress police dashboard camera footage of the traffic stop that led to his arrest. An attorney for Wilder Police Chief Anthony Rouse made the request during a pretrial hearing this week. Rouse is suspended without pay after his March 1 arrest by Alexandria police. We wonder if the Wilder Police Department uses dashboard cams in its cruisers. (What's good for the goose, etc.)

They had better come on strong. The Bengals will be featured on the season opener of Monday Night Footballon ESPN in September. The team will face off against the Ravens in Baltimore. Other highlights of the 2012 schedule, which was released Tuesday, include the Bengals playing their first regular season game in week two against the Cleveland Browns in Cincinnati, and playing divisional foes the Steelers in week 16 at Pittsburgh.

A large swarm of bees has invaded Cincinnati's Covedale neighborhood. Residents on Woodbriar Lane are concerned about thousands of active bees going from yard to yard looking for a place to make a hive. The bees have been doing it for the last couple of days, and residents say they're swarming around different locations, changing locations in as little as 30 minutes in some cases. The buzzing sounds can be heard from 20 feet away or more, they added.

In news elsewhere, friends of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney insist their pal isn't an android. Romney is a nice guy, they said, adding they are at a loss to explain his stiff demeanor and unusual syntax on the campaign trail. Maybe he's simply trying too hard, some friends told The Washington Post. Yeah, that's it, I'm sure.

Reacting to rising gasoline prices, President Obama proposed new measures this week to reduce oil market manipulation. The proposals, which observers say are unlikely to get support from a divided Congress, include increasing civil and criminal penalties on individuals and companies involved in manipulative practices involving commodities speculation.

In yet another setback for U.S.-Afghan relations, photographs of American troops gleefully posing with corpses of insurgents they've killed were given to The Los Angeles Times. The U.S. soldier who released the photos said he did so to draw attention to the safety risk of a breakdown in leadership and discipline. The Army has started a criminal investigation.

A shadowy conservative group that works behind-the-scenes to push laws that call for stricter voter identification requirements and “stand your ground” initiatives is disbanding its “Public Safety and Elections” task force. The task force, part of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), has been the prime vehicle for proposing and advancing what critics describe as voter-suppression and anti-democratic initiatives, not just restrictive voter ID laws but also plans to limit the ability of citizens to petition for referendums and constitutional changes that favor workers and communities. In recent weeks, numerous of ALEC's corporate members have left then group including Coca-Cola, Intuit and McDonald's.

Thousands of documents detailing crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments, an official review concluded. Those papers that survived the purge were flown discreetly to Britain where they were hidden for 50 years in a secret Foreign Office archive, beyond the reach of historians and members of the public, and in breach of legal obligations for them to be transferred into the public domain.

While anti-urban Cincinnatians gripe over the
twice-approved $95 million streetcar project — some going so far as to
attach anti-funding amendments to federal bills that will never be
included in the final legislation — authorities on the other side of the
river are demonstrating just how little $20 million on transportation
funding can provide. The state will widen KY 237 in Boone County using
elevated ramps to allow for left-hand turns, adding a freeway-style
element to the residential/corridor area. The two-year project will be
paid for using Federal Surface Transportation Program funds.

Starting this fall all students in Newport
Independent Schools will get free breakfast and lunch because the
district is participating in the Community Eligibility Option in
President Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.

For particle physicists, finding the Higgs boson is a key
to confirming the standard model of physics that explains what gives
mass to matter and, by extension, how the universe was formed. …

Rosen compared the results scientists are preparing to
announce Wednesday to finding the fossilized imprint of a dinosaur: “You
see the footprints and the shadow of the object, but you don’t actually
see it.”

Spain won the 2012 European Championship soccer tournament on Sunday with a
4-0 victory over Italy. The Spanish team is being considered one of the
greatest ever, as it has won three straight major tournaments, including
the 2010 World Cup and 2008 Euro.

Mitt Romney will visit the Cincinnati
area this week: tonight at a private fundraiser at the Hilton
Netherland Plaza, Thursday at a Carthage manufacturing comany and
this weekend to hang with Rep. John Boehner up north and probably
with Sen. Rob Portman at some point. President Obama plans to be
around soon, too.

Economists say Romney's job creation
claims need more specifics before they'll be believable. On the other
hand, Obama's American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act has saved or created 1.4 million to 3.3 million
jobs, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and the American
Jobs Act would create 1.9 million, according to Moody's. From NPR:

+11.5 million — that's how many jobs
Romney claimed
last September he would create in the first term of his
administration. But true to form, Romney never said how he would
create that many jobs, nor has any reputable economist backed up his
claim. "Nowhere in the 160 page plan could I find a stated job
creation number," wrote Rebecca Thiess of EPI. "The math
doesn't just appear to be fuzzy — it appears to be nonexistent."
Added David Madland of the Center for American Progress: "It is a plan from the Republican
candidate for president designed to maximize corporate profits. What
it doesn't do is help the middle class or create jobs." Even the
conservative editorial page of theWall Street Journal called Romney's 59-point economic
tome "surprisingly timid and tactical considering our economic
predicament."

Democrat Ron Barber won the
congressional seat left by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an
assassination attempt and resigned to focus on her recovery. The win
gives Democrats hope for taking control of the House in November.

What makes the referendum in California different is that, for the
first time, voters and not politicians will be the ones to decide.
And this has the food industry worried. Understandably so, since only
one in four Americans is convinced that GMOs are "basically safe", according to a survey conducted by the Mellman Group, and a big majority wants
food containing GMOs to be labeled.

This is one of the few issues in America today that enjoys broad
bipartisan support: 89% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats want
genetically altered foods to be labeled, as they already are in 40
nations in Europe, in Brazil, and even in China. In 2007, then
candidate Obama latched onto this popular issue saying that he would
push for labeling – a promise the president has yet to keep.

Sen. Rob Portman is
sitting on more cash than nearly all of his GOP colleagues in the
Senate, despite the fact that he’s not up for re-election until
2016. There has been widespread speculation that Portman is a
Republican vice presidential candidate, and only three Senators have
more money on-hand than his Promoting Our Republican Team PAC
(PORTPAC) leadership committee.

Companies upstream from
Cincinnati have been dumping pollutants into the Ohio River since the
1940s, and federal authorities have reached a $5.5 million settlement
to start cleaning it all up. Eighteen companies and several federal
agencies will collectively contribute to restoring the Ashtabula
River and Harbor in northeast Ohio. Here's the latest from Dredging Today (the authoritative voice of underwater excavation activity and other earth-altering digs).

Locals who have
recently “pimped their rides” might want to read up on a bill
passed by Ohio lawmakers yesterday that bans hidden compartments in
vehicles. Police don’t want to have to open those fancy
compartments to check whether there are drugs inside or just a
10th tiny TV. Hear that, Colerain?

Here’s what Obama and
his advisers do on Sundays (after the prez’s round of golf, of
course): size up Mitt Romney.

U.S. job growth was
down in April, adding only 115,000 positions after seeing 154,000
added in March. The unemployment rate dropped .1 percentage point to
8.1 percent, largely due to workers leaving the labor force.
Republicans have some thoughts on the matter (Obama’s fault).

"If you examine
how I conduct myself," Nugent said, "I don't think a day
goes by in my life for many, many years now that we don't do charity
work for children. ... Call me when you sit down across from someone
who has more families with dying little boys and girls who get a call
to take them on their last fishing trip in life.

"Call me,"
Nugent continued in a raised, irritated voice, "when you meet
someone who does that more than I do. Because that's really moderate.
In fact, you know what that is? That's extreme. ... I'm an extremely
loving, passionate man, and people who investigate me honestly,
without the baggage of political correctness, ascertain the
conclusion that I'm a damned nice guy. ... And if you can find a
screening process more powerful than that, I'll [expletive]. Or
[expletive]. How's that sound?"

Headline: “Tech world
is out for blood.” Apparently Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s decision
to start a patent war was not such a good idea.

New York Yankees future
Hall of Fame pitcher Mariano Rivera tore his ACL during pregame
batting practice yesterday, putting the 42-year-old’s career in
jeopardy. There had already been speculation that Rivera would retire
after this season, and recovery from ACL surgery usually takes more
than nine months.